Last spring, Lily read something in a Farmer’s Almanac about butterflies being endangered. Something about how their habitat was going away and there wasn’t enough milkweed for them to eat. As Lily is apt to do, so went on and on about it. After that, on a near daily basis, she’d ask if we could plant a butterfly garden in our yard.
“Mom, can we plant a butterfly garden?”
“Mom, when are we going to plant the butterfly garden?”
“Mom, can we plant the butterfly garden soon?
“Mom! Are we ever going to do the butterfly garden?”
I guess you could say she was pretty fixated on the whole butterfly garden thing. She was anxious about helping out some butterflies- specifically some Monarch butterflies.
“Mom, Monarch Butterflies need milkweed. Do you think we could get some milkweed to plant in our butterfly garden.”
In the midst of whatever I was handling at the moment- probably doing the dishes or re-shelving the piles of board books that Annie enjoyed de-shelving, or relocating piles of dog and cat fur from one end of the house to another- I’d wave my hand and tell her, “Sure, sure, we can do that sometime.”
But Lily isn’t one to tolerate parental procrastination- especially when the fate of a living creature was at stake. This butterfly garden business was top of mind, so finally one weekend when we were at Lowes probably picking up exciting Lowes-type things like air filters and yard bags and various hardwares- Lily and Jovie helped me pick up some plants for this “butterfly garden” she’d been insisting on.
I put “butterfly garden” in quotes because, given my spotty history with gardening, I wasn’t all that optimistic about it being anything more than a place where a few sad perennials attempted to survive as they were slowly consumed by crabgrass and dandelions. I’m fairly certain in Lily’s vision this butterfly garden would be an enormous Better Homes and Garden-worthy spread dripping in multicolor blooms and fluttering butterflies.
I’d read that butterflies liked purple, so we grabbed a couple pots of cone flowers and some verbena. I figured we were good. But not according to Lily.
“We need milkweed!” Lily insisted. “Monarch butterflies need milkweed!”
I looked all over the garden section- no milkweed. Lily looked distressed, but I assured her the butterflies would like the other flowers we found.
“I just really wish we could find milkweed,” was her response. “That’s what the Monarch caterpillars eat.”
In a last-ditch effort I did a half-hearted scan around the flowers for sale in front of the store (I mean, why would a store sell a plant that advertises itself as a “weed” anyway?). I was about to return to the checkout when I spotted some yellow flowers that looked milkweed-ish based on Google searches earlier that day. As it turned they looked milkweed-ish because they were, in fact, milkweed. I grabbed a container and headed back to the cart.
“You saved the day, Mom!” Lily exclaimed when I returned to the checkout line.
Back at home, we claimed a sunny patch of mulch in the backyard for our butterfly garden. Our new flowers would share dirt with a few cosmo seeds I’d thrown back there earlier in the spring and the two sunflowers that managed to survive the great bunny raid of 2019 (not that you can really call a lone bunny hopping about the backyard in search of fresh nibbles a raid… but it sounds much more exciting the other way, doesn’t it?)
Where were we?
Ah yes- the part where we weeded and dug holes and offered ourselves as human sacrifices to the local mosquito population. Our butterfly garden was modest, but scrappy. Lily’s dreams were fulfilled more or less. I guess I should say less because what would really fulfill the original vision was a butterfly garden covered in… well… butterflies.
That part took some time. And some weeding. And some reviving wilting plants with much-needed water. And more weeding. All the weeding. Oh, and then we figured out that mulching might help with the weeding. So Brad mulched and then there was less weeding, but more watering because it’s been really dry and hot around these parts.
Finally, it happened. The butterflies found the butterfly garden. Humble coppery-colored ones and small cloudy butterflies. The occasional swallowtail. We were thrilled about the butterflies. But Lily kept wondering when a Monarch butterfly might come around.
I wasn’t all that optimistic. I mean- we had this one lowly milkweed plant. And it was being overtaken by the spazzy cosmos. I call them spazzy because they first grew absurdly tall. Then their stalks fell over on the ground and I figured they were close to death. But then their stalks, weirdly, grew roots and sent up new shoots. And then those shoots grew buds. And then those buds blossomed into flowers.
Plants are weird.
But I digress. Again. It just seemed unlikely that an endangered Monarch would somehow stumble on our tired-looking plant in our little backyard in suburbia.
But it did happen.
One day, Lily looked about back and spotted something.
“Mom! There’s a Monarch! It’s a Monarch butterfly!”
And it was.
Just one. But oh. How beautiful.
We were all very excited. Then a couple weeks later, I got a text from Brad.
Actually, there were four monarch caterpillars on the milkweed plant, Lily reported: Chomper, Chomper Jr., Nectar and Chrysalis.
I went to the garden- excuse me, The Butterfly Garden, at the next opportunity to meet our new neighbors. And sure enough, there they were. As if by magic.
Chomper, Chomper Jr., Nectar and … Chrysalis, dangling from the left-for-dead cosmos.
The photo doesn’t do any of them justice. Especially the Chrysalis which is speckled in gold- as if it’s filagreed.
“It looks like glitter,” one of the girls friends said.
This butterfly garden- a half-assed effort to placate my sweet, earnest girl- feels like a miracle. Like something that shouldn’t have happened. But did.
Or rather, it only shouldn’t have happened because in my grown-up mind the idea of throwing one little plant in the ground and expecting Monarchs seemed a little foolish. Of course, in Lily’s mind it was inevitable. All the pieces were in place.
It was a butterfly garden, after all.
As always, shame on me for not seeing what was right in front of me. That if you plant the right thing- magic.
That it doesn’t have to be all the flowers. It can just be the few. That whatever thing you do doesn’t have to be the thing that Martha Stewart would envy. It doesn’t have to be the thing that solves all the problems. That saves all the butterflies.
It just needs to be done and that can be enough.
Until next year. When we plant more milkweed.